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Aesthetic actions almost instantaneous: part 18 Restoration by Paula

Scamparini

The Artist talks with Roberto Muffoletto, Carlos Frana and Ftima Lambert

The illustrations, the directed images, mainly reverberate in the two-dimensional


works, proceeding from collections of validated Museums, that is, masterpieces. Also
and sometimes, they are related to images of artefacts and other objects used in
traditional or daily use, added by referentialities of the anthropological, ethnographic
forum, promulgating ideological reasons, which are geostrategic in sociocultural terms,
in a way so to speak. Not intending to analyze exhaustively this subject that brings
together different approaches, but lets note how loaded is the artistic intention of
Paula Scamparini when exercising her right to choose in and on the images.
The Artist validates them by denouncing them, this is an almost paradox, so one might
think. But that is not her scope. It is a work that calls for articulated and crossed
methodologies, by means of a thought that has built up from its creative and personal
assumption, driven by sociological and aesthetically political demands and designs.
The images on Paula Scamparini's tiles come from various sources, as mentioned
above. To the illustrations of the Manuals of History, still used today in the Brazilian
Schools, are added the misrepresentations that proliferate in the media, printed or
audiovisual, social and webgraphic networks, assuming ungovernable contours. The
exercise of the right of ownership over images disrupts any prior theories and
performances of the Internet. It is the myth of possession, a paradoxical gluttony, as I
have said in analogous writing contexts.
At the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis three moments of Paula Scamparini's work are
shown, works and an installation produced during her artistic residence in Oporto.
At the first moment, in the Atrium of the Museum, the Brazilian artist exposes the
books, the Manuals of History of Brazil, opened in the pages that show the illustrations
transposed for the Azulejos [Tiles]. The books are protected [from time and weather]
by the glass lid that prevents them from being veneered. The illustrations are frozen in
their pages, doubly impeded before the public that cant touch them. As the story is
not touched on in its motto, one is only believed to be doing so.
In the second moment, the room where the famous painting titled Mrtir Cristo, by
Victoriano Braga, resides, there are clichs where news extracts chosen by Paula
Scamparini are collected, fulfilling the purpose of declamatory about their references.
The raw materials of ideas and affirmations that serve aesthetic and artistic purposes
that are effectively intervening.
In the third moment, the Hall of Marques de Oliveira where the top, Cephalus and
Prcris dominate, we see a carpet of tiles reassembled following category criteria,
where they stand out "problematic figures" (so the artist calls them), such as: The
Captain of the Forest, Daughters, Free Negroes, Chargers, Indigenous, Jesuit Missions -
cultural and religious domain
It deals with figurations developed from real existences, with their causes and
consequences, in a plot apparently managed between the real and the imaginary,
where the doses of exoticism go in a collision course with the dispassionate lucidity of
the ethical rigor of History in review And "uncritical decontamination," so to speak.
The carpet or panel of tiles extends with thicknesses, textures and erasures that
simulate, before the visitor's eye, a topography that oscillates between the times and
the spaces, generating internal movements in History and by the Art.
They are Restorations, recoveries not to fill in the same way as the things presented
themselves, in their most evident skin, but to retake it in its essence and truth, beyond
the representations.
Although these have delayed and endured, establishing almost unshakeable
convictions for some. Restore a stage of genuineness, questioner of the present and
the rights that assist in a composite axiology of the Human.

Paula Scamparini [2017] - Restauros #1, #2 e #3 - The installations, adding different


materials and occupying variable areas, were carried out in situ during the Artistic
Residence held in Porto, from July 11th to 25th, 2017, curated by Maria de Ftima
Lambert.

MUSEU NACIONAL SOARES dos REIS - Rua D. Manuel II 44, 4050-014 Porto
Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.

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